This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

3ds max has always had one of the fastest renderers in the 3d industry.
Its native scanline renderer has been the backbone of everything from cinematic
special effects to architectural rendering to high-resolution print work. In
short, it's a fast workhorse that gets most every rendering job done
quickly. (People who want better control and more rendering options can also
employ some excellent third-party renderers, such as the Brazil Rendering System
[http://www.splutterfish.com/],
Cebas's finalRender
[http://www.finalrender.com]
[http://www.cebas.com/],
and The Chaos Group's V-Ray
[http://www.chaosgroup.com].)

In this chapter, I'll present several dozen tips on how to get the
most out of your native 3ds max scanline renderer. In addition, contributor
Aksel Karcher (a freelance designer and lighting technical director, at
[http://www.akselkarcher.com/]
weighs in with several mental ray tips for those 3ds max users who want to stay
on the cutting edge.

RAY TRACING: SPEEDING UP THINGS (OBJECTS)

If you love the look of ray tracing in your scene (for glass and metallic
surfaces) but you're not a fan of raytraced material rendering times when
using the 3ds max scanline renderer, don't worry: You can speed up your
renderings by doing a few simple things.

First, make sure antialiasing is unchecked in the Rendering > Raytracer
Settings > Raytracer/ Global Ray Antialiaser menu when you're doing test
renderings, then turn antialiasing back on when you're doing your final
production rendering. (Note: You must be using the 3ds max default scanline
renderer as your production renderer. If you have mental ray chosen instead, the
Raytracer Settings and Raytrace Global Include/Exclude menu items are grayed
out.) Second, check your scene object integrity: make sure you've welded
the cores of Lathed objects, that objects have unified face normals, and that
the objects aren't degenerate. (That is, they should not have missing or
coincident faces, overlapping vertices, and so on.) Third, if you don't
need to keep the modifier stacks active for some or all of your scene objects,
then collapse them to the modifier stack results (preferably Editable Meshes).
Fourth, keep your Raytrace material as one-sided instead of two-sided, unless
it's absolutely necessary to represent surfaces such as thick glass.